Mortal Issues
by cuddlefishprince
Summary: 27 Last Hours / Mortal Issues [AU] The first time Dean and Cas meet is in hospital. Dean comes by to visit his brother who had an accident with his girlfriend and accidently crushes into Castiel who had just survived a suicide attempt. From the first second onwards they feel connected by an invisible bond... (Working Title)
1. Prologue - Castiel

Sirens. The noises I never wanted to hear again.  
White. The color I would not even intend to miss, unless it was the deep black I was diving into.

Just a few moments ago, I would have given you the exact time in minutes and secons and breaths I took, but the glass of my watch broke when I hit the ground and stopped the time. And with it there stopped my time forever, as I thought. But in reality, I survived. The glass of my watch wasn't piercing a dead bodys flesh yet.

_I don't know if I ever belonged to this place._

It was just moments ago, I hold his hand and we took two steps forward. Into the deep black nothing I had been so afraid of, in the past. But for that part of my story, I was not. Not the slightest little bit. I was indeed, a little happy. Happy for this being the end, for myself making this the final chapter of a book I never wrote. And not giving another one the opportunity to do so. Not even death or time, but myself.

_Whether in this life, nor in another._

I always wanted to create my own universe, give my life its own direction. But for now it was the sirens, the noises. The unbearable heat in my legs, the buzzing in my head, that created another way and forced me into it, with a strength I never had. Once more, fortune was running against me. In time and opportunities. In a endless labyrinth of a life, I was just about to end, a moment ago.


	2. Chapter 1 - White

The intense of the pure white, it covered the whole place. The first thing that came to his mind in this endlessly white universe was a question so simple, so well-used that it surprised himself asking it: "Where am I?"  
It was the silence in the white nowhere that gave him the answer he feared the most.

In Hospital.  
Alive.

As his eyes observed the place, the first thing that was luring for him was the broken watch on the side table. The glass had been removed completely and he didn't waste a thought on why someone had left it in the room and not thrown it away. The second thing that catched his attention was the window. A big, white frame that catched the cloudless blue sky, or, at least a part of it.  
He tried to slide to the edge of the bed, but there was something that bothered him. It was the coldness in his legs, his toes, he could barely feel.

"_What if..._", was the first clear thought he catched up with  
And within the next second, before he could even finish the sentence on his mind, he felt it. Nothing.  
The boy pulled the bed sheets aside to look down his legs, scared that they weren't there anymore. And the fear grew bigger and bigger, as he found them, where they had always been. But bandaged in white. Intense white, pure white.  
He tried to move them, but he couldn't. He wanted to scream, scream at himself, drown the pure white world in swearing, shouting and disgust. But he couldn't.  
The nurses came, changed the badages, brought food. The doctors came and went off. They told him the diagnosis and asked him questions, but he didn't respond. And he sat there, frozen in the last movement he took, fingernails digged in the white sheets. Fists clenched around a color he wished he never saw again.


	3. Chapter 2 - Rain

The morning Sam left the Winchester household was supposed to become a cloudy day. It was announced to rain and the first drops hit the dusty ground just when he drove his car down the freeway. Dean was the only one at home that day. John had left the place in the night, after a fight with the boys. No one could recall the reason anymore. It was as irrelevant as it could have been. Since none of them wasted much of a thought on trivia for long, they kept moving on.  
Dean told himself both of them would come back soon.  
But it got evening and it got night. The rain came and the rain stopped. He couldn't sleep all night and waited for at least one of them to come back, but they didn't. It took John a week and Sam half a year to come back. The eldest Winchester came home with a story he kept for himself, the youngest Winchester came back to the city unconscious and in an ambulance.

The silence had drawn its stories to develop, the papers brought the truth and though nobody lost a word about it. Sure, they were worried. But they worried on their own way.  
John left the hospital after a short visit, but at least he came once or twice a week. Dean would have stayed forever, if the nurses didn't force him to go every night. He came back in the morning, as the first visitor when they just opened the gates of the small hospital.


	4. Chapter 3 - Reflection

An accident, they called it. An accident with a truck that hit their car.  
It had been a stormy day with tons of rain. Sam had lost control over the car and slided on the opposite driving part of the road, where the truck crossed their way. The woman on the seat next to him, his girlfriend Jessica, was dead within a second. But the driver of the truck called the ambulance and brought him to the next hospital. He stood with them until the other Winchesters had arrived and took care of it.

"They were planning to visit us on the weekend.", Dean mumbled, as he took a first look at Sams notes, "They didn't even live that far away."  
"Hmm..", John made and got up from the uncomfortable seats in the waiting area. He tried not to look his son in the eyes, since he could see himself reflecting in them. And he still was not sure if he could see his reflections in his yonger sons eyes ever again.  
"Why didn't he call, I mean..."  
He was suddenly interrupted by a nurse, opening the door to the room with the number 1.27. A room that was supposed to become 'Sam's room' later.  
Back then, they were far off from knowing how the story developed in the close future. Still uncertain about the diagnosis and the clean white, that was eating up more than just one mans future and present. Under the same roof there were so many other stories, but one in particular that was about to connect to the tragedy of the Winchesters.


	5. Chapter 4 - Deaf and Mute

Sirens, they were not the only noises that still echoed through his head.  
The sound of his brothers bones, as they crashed when they hit the river.  
The rocks, the smell of blood.

His last few words, mutual, as everytime, reserved for Castiel only to hear them.

It was a secret they shared since they were kids. A strong bond, the signs only the two of them understood. Whenever Gabriel had dragged the younger brother along to play pranks on the other kids, it was only the silence they needed. They shared it like others shared the words and the sounds of the outer world. But they were kept away from Gabriel ever since.

Sealed behind the words deaf and mute.

Even though, for Castiel his brother had a voice. And it was the prettiest of all voices he ever heard. Maybe it was because it was only meant for him to hear. Even though it might have been imagination only, he still believed in his brothers silent voice.


	6. Chapter 5 - His Brothers Voice

Weeks after he still heard it.  
Heard it when they heaved him into the wheelchair that became the only way for him to leave his coffin of a bed anymore. Heard it when they sent him to the small park arrangement inside the hospital gates where he tried not to attract the attention of the visitors, the people with their families.

_I'm still a little jealous of those with a childhood and a family. Those who have someone waiting for them when they come home._

The last few sentences and even more. It wasn't the memories, the long-vanished sounds of his brothers words that haunted him. It was something else. Something he almost forgot about. Though it was something so mandatory, so impeccable, so entirely sad, he never thought it could perish from his mind.

_The last goodbye I wrote for you._

Words, that kept calling his name, words that he never heard before and though they seemed so familiar to him. Voiced by someone who remained silent to the rest of the world. Words and sounds that were kept a secret evidece from everyone else.


	7. Chapter 6 - Home

A bunch of handwritten letters, crushed and crumbled, stuffed together and hidden away from everyone else. Enough of the evidence it would need. Enough of a testament they could give the world that remained.  
A secret pact, a deal with the devil they called it. And so they handled it. Kept it locked-away, hidden from the curious eyes of the outer world.  
The boxes they kept and sealed. They buried them in the garden of the house they grew up at. A building that was falling apart by now, overgrown with ivy. An attic completely removed, since it was made of wood and the seasons of storm took it away from its place. And still it felt like home, when they visited it, from time to time.  
Even in the hospital, when Castiel visited the old house in his sleep, in his daydreams, when he walked up the stairs to the patio, he still felt safe. He felt home. Even though the place was now miles away, inherited by memories of loss, by long-perished stories and tales of brothers and the short childhood they had, it was still a home to him.


	8. Chapter 7 - Visitors

Visitors. He watched them as they came and go. From the huge window in his room, where his wheelchair went all on his own. It wasn't the nurses or the doctors who moved him there, and all by himself, Castiel thought it might have been Gabriel, who came for a visit every morning. Who wanted to show him the world they missed for so long. As the ghost or the _angel_ he was by now.

Dean, on the opposite never believed in angels. Not until that morning. The morning of the 27th of April, when he walked up the stairs to the hospital entrace once more. He didn't stop at the reception, not for a moment. He knew where he wanted to go, no, where he had to go.  
First floor, Sam's room. Eaten up by the white and the aseptic smell of disinfectant. The only dot of colors lied in the bed. And even he lost his colors time after time, as he would melt with the environment he slept at.


	9. Chapter 8 - Diagnosis

'Coma' they called it. A slumber, it was.  
And it was one of the very rare occasions Dean wished for his dad to be at least a little protective. Wished for him to call it a deep sleep, a nightmare maybe. But the name of this demon he fought within his sleep was death and not slumber.

'Paralyzation' they called it. A curse, it was for Castiel.  
He couldn't leave the hospital, he had nowhere to go to anymore. Staying was torture.  
But time healed his superficial wounds and medication cured his pain. After all, the only scars that remained weren't visible to the doctors and nurses. They ran deep and ate him up inside.

And in the early night he tried to run from the place that gave him shelter. He knew it wasn't meant to be for long, he would be sent off one day. But how could you run from the past? Where do you run to, when you lost everything?


End file.
